A CITY SCHOOL EXPERIMENT THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

By Sara Mosle;

Published: May 28, 1995

JOSEPH NEWKIRK LOOKED LIKE SPIDERMAN. HE WAS clinging to the cyclone fence surrounding the playground at Intermediate School 70 on West 17th Street in Manhattan. His tie whipped his face in the breeze. Far below, his students egged on their superhero: "You can do it, Mr. Newkirk!" and "You've almost got it now-w-w-w!" The string he was clutching made it look as if he were actually spinning a web. It rose to the top of the fence, slipped down through the bare branches of the tree, dipped and ascended again, and finally halted where the kite had become ensnared in the fire escape of an adjoining building.

Newkirk pulled; the kite wagged its tail. "Oooh! Careful!" cried several kids below. The students had built the kite in Newkirk's middle-school science class at the School for the Physical City, a new public school in its second year in Manhattan, and they didn't want to see their latest test model destroyed. Across the playground, kites of all shapes and sizes floated like clouds above the cement plain. Below, clumps of students shadowed their movements and recorded data on clipboards.

The students, most of them barely teen-agers, wore the standard uniforms of stylish urban grunge -- baggy jeans, T-shirts, flannel work shirts, baseball caps, boots, sneakers. Their parents had chosen to send them to S.P.C., as it's called, instead of their regular neighborhood schools, as part of a foundling citywide "choice" program initiated by Joseph A. Fernandez in 1992, when he was School Chancellor. The students, from mostly lower- and middle-income families, come from all over the city. Although there are slightly more boys than girls, the kids otherwise represent an ideal cross-section of the city's student population. By ideal, I mean more integrated: African-Americans, Latinos and whites each constitute somewhat less than a third; the remaining 15 percent or so are Asian. The students could have walked straight out of one of those multicultural Benetton ads.

Newkirk's students were conducting an experiment, and they are part of one too. The School for the Physical City is just one of 50 new public schools that have opened in New York City in the last two years. Fernandez pushed for their creation before being ousted in 1993. They are organized around a variety of themes and pedagogical philosophies. Their unwieldy names announce their missions: the High School for Health Professions and Human Services, El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, the Kingsborough Academy of Sciences High School. Each of them, though, might be called the Smaller School of Smaller Classes, for that is their chief, shared, revolutionary idea.

Although all of the schools fall under the auspices of the city's central Board of Education, most of these new schools have been given crucial support from several local nonprofit groups that last year received the first "Annenberg grants." These much-coveted awards come from the philanthropist Walter K. Annenberg, who pledged $500 million in December 1993 to help reform public school systems nationwide. Over the next five years, New York City will receive some $50 million, to be matched 2 to 1 by both public and private dollars. (Already $8.5 million has been raised from three organizations -- Time Warner, the Aaron Diamond Foundation and the Charles Hayden Foundation.) Among educators, Annenberg's name is constantly being invoked, as in "When Annenberg comes. . ." and "When Annenberg gets here. . ." and "Now that Annenberg is here." You'd think Godot had finally arrived.

Annenberg's money has provided a desperately needed infusion of hope into the city's beleaguered public school system. But as great as his gift may seem, it's dwarfed by the city's annual $8 billion education budget and doesn't begin to make up for recent cutbacks. Because of the ongoing fiscal crisis in New York, some $540 million has been cut from the city's schools in the last year alone, and an additional $750 million may be slashed even before classes begin in the fall -- more than $1 billion total. All of this comes at a time of steeply rising enrollments. A new demographic bulge, the baby boomers' children, has just entered grade school.

In New York, this influx has been compounded by a huge increase in immigration. In New York City, for instance, the total number of students in the last two years has topped one million. And the number is expected to rise by some 20,000 students annually well into the 21st century. Overcrowding is rampant, with classes held in hallways, cafeterias, auditoriums, closets and even some lavatories. School facilities, most of them built before the Depression, are falling apart. But because of the city's budget crunch, a capital improvement campaign has essentially been abandoned. Some of the city's neighborhood high schools resemble anonymous factories, with upward of 4,000 students each. Production, one might say, is at a standstill: only half of the city's entering freshmen typically graduate in four years.